Obama crackdown on press freedom escalates

Breitbart Big Government ^ | 20 Feb 2014 | by BEN SHAPIRO

[onyx]

Last week, Reporters Without Borders dropped America in the World Press Freedom Index 2014 from 33^rd to 46^th. James Risen of The New York Times rightly explained, “I think 2013 will go down in history as the worst year for press freedom in the United States’ modern history.” And he’s right. The violation of press freedoms has been egregious under this administration, even as the press fetes President Obama as an honest and effective commander-in-chief.

Selective Access. President Obama has regularly granted special access to reporters who give him preferential coverage. CBS’ Steve Kroft admitted as much after a late-2012 interview with the President during which CBS clipped Obama’s explicit refusal to label Benghazi an act of terror: “(Obama) knows that we’re not going to play ‘gotcha’ with him, that we’re not going to go out of our way to make him look bad or stupid.”

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, got special access for a profile of Obama for Vanity Fair – but Obama insisted on redlining his quotes. Lewis explained that “the White House insisted on signing off on the quotes that would appear.” A reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle was threatened for covering an anti-Obama protest. As early as 2008, candidate Obama was kicking dissenters off planes after their outlets endorsed John McCain.

Targeting Reporters. In May 2013, the Associated Press dropped the bombshell that the Department of Justice had grabbed phone records for its reporters and editors of the course of two months. Records for 20 telephone lines belonging to the AP and reporters for it were seized between April and May of 2012. Those seizures affected over 100 journalists.

[dandiegirl]

Fallon seems nice enough, not too funny, now that I know this and with the Mooch in the first week, I will never watch again. He bores me actually, anyway.

[onedoug]

Gosh. Some guts on some of those, gestapo?

[onyx]

I’ll never watch his show either.

[onyx]

Yeah, you’re right ... gestapo.

[Democrat_media]

the press is the socialist enemy. it is these marxist monsters that have created every problem we have, have grown government and installed one of their own Obama as president.

the press rules this country and has for 100 years. they create the false reality that we live in where trayvon and zimmerman are news